The Midweek Download: Feb. 15th Edition–Windows on ARM, a MSFT Engineer is Named to the NAE, plus Windows Server, IE10 & Caradigm

In this edition of The Midweek Download, we’ve stories on Windows on ARM, a distinguished Microsoft engineer named to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, a profile on members of the Windows Server team and much more.

Building Windows for the ARM processor architecture. This Feb. 9 post on Building Windows 8 (penned by Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live Division) is about the technical foundation of what we call, for the purposes of this post, Windows on ARM, or WOA. WOA is a new member of the Windows family, much like Windows Server, Windows Embedded, or Windows Phone. As with those products, WOA builds on the foundation of Windows, has a very high degree of commonality and very significant shared code with Windows 8, and will be developed for, sold, and supported as part of the largest computing ecosystem in the world. Don’t miss it! Also, check out this Tuesday post on enabling accessibility in Windows 8.

Microsoft engineer named to U.S. NAE. One of the singular advantages of working for Microsoft—and for Microsoft Research, in particular—is the opportunity to work on products and technologies that have a positive influence on multitudes worldwide. Henrique Malvar, Microsoft distinguished engineer and chief scientist at Microsoft Research, knows that all too well—as do his peers. On Feb. 9, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE) announced that Malvar (pictured below) had been elected as a member of that prestigious group. Read this Feb. 10 post on Inside Microsoft Research for the whole story.

Explaining Nokia’s ClearBlack display technology.In the quest to beat the sunshine reflecting on smartphone displays, Nokia has sought to find a balance that gives you a better reading experience but doesn’t simply amp up the brightness at the cost of battery life. Hence, the ClearBlack display which uses a sequence of polarizing layers to eliminate reflections. Check out this Feb. 9 post on Next at Microsoft for the rest of the story.

Meet the team that puts ‘amazing power’ at people’s fingertips. Start telling most people about the importance of servers and their eyes glaze over. They would much rather talk about some cool new smartphone app or the latest social networking site. Yet without servers, the things we value most about technology—from mobile devices to online shopping—would be impossible. In this Tuesday feature story, members of the Windows Server team speak with Microsoft News Center about their groundbreaking work in moving customers to the cloud—and what else they find fascinating. Below is a photo of members of the Windows Server team:

GE, Microsoft share plans for new joint venture, Caradigm. General Electric Co. (GE), through its healthcare IT business, and Microsoft announced on Monday several developments for their planned 50-50 joint venture, including the intention to demonstrate future product capabilities at HIMSS12, the year’s largest healthcare IT trade show, later this month. The new company, to be named Caradigm™, is expected to launch in the first half of 2012, pending regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. Read this press release on the Microsoft News Center for more detail.

Open source OData tools for MySQL and PHP developers. To enable more interoperability scenarios, Microsoft has recently released two open source tools that provide support for the Open Data Protocol (OData) for PHP and MySQL developers working on any platform. The growing popularity of OData is creating new opportunities for developers working with a wide variety of platforms and languages. An ever increasing number of data sources are being exposed as OData producers, and a variety of OData consumers can be used to query these data sources via OData’s simple REST API. Read this Feb. 9 post on the Interoperability @ Microsoft Blog for the rest of the story.

That’s it for this edition of The Midweek Download! Drop by this Friday for another round of Microsoft news with Weekend Reading.